Snipers

A stand-alone murder mystery/time travel story.

Snipers is a murder mystery which also has time travel elements but the SF part never dominates. The past is Vienna 1913 and the present is Vienna 2005.

1913 has three storylines: one is an assassin who goes around killing certain people to prevent them from doing stuff, one is William who has a nuke with him and he trails his victim Stavros Papadopoulos, and the third is Johann Runge, a detective ahead of his time with regards to police procedure. The modern story follows Sofie Branstadter, a historian and a famous non-fiction writer who wants to write her next book about the Carnival sniper, and Anton Runge, Johann's great-grandchild.

The assassin is determined to kill some people in order to change the future (his past). However, Johann Runge is hot on his trail. Runge even writes a non-fiction book about the assassin whom everyone calls the Carnival sniper. His book is hugely successful but because Runge didn't catch the killer, he's widely thought of now as an unsuccessful cop even though he solved a lot of other cases. Sofie's parents were killed by an unknown murderer when she was just a little girl, so she's fascinated by the Carnival sniper who is also world's first serial killer. She wants to get new evidence and starts by exhuming the killer's first victim, Viktor Adler. The Austrian courts agreed to Sofie's request to dig up Adler's body and see what can be learned from him. To her surprise her team finds strange kinds of bullets which seem to be top secret in 2005.

I'm a fan of Rusch's SF and mystery stories so it's not surprising that I enjoyed this book a lot. Sofie has her own problems and reasons for writing about the Carnival sniper and Runge is a meticulous detective. The assassin and William also have they own motivations so they aren't just faceless lunatics. The story has quite a few surprises so I don't want to tell too much about it.